And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (21 page)

Demand for ethanol, corn plastic, corn syrup, feed corn, and a whole host of other corn-based products (including, one has to assume, corn itself) has made the thick, black Iowa soil more valuable than it has almost ever been. Two decades ago, Mark told me, he sold corn pretty regularly for less than a dollar a bushel, but in the fall of 2011, prices were over $7. It's an attractive proposition to a farmer, to make the most he possibly can with the highest possible yield from his land. This means planting every inch of a farm with corn. Land that may have at one point been too wet or low-lying to plant, and thus left to prairie grass and other habitat perfect for the ringneck pheasant, was drained and planted. The corn itself was harvested to the nub. I remember visiting Iowa after the harvest as a child and young man and seeing miles and miles of dun-colored fields, stubbly with shorn cornstalks and blown over with enough vegetation to allow for a nesting bird; vegetation that would freeze and then be tilled under in the spring to reintegrate nutrients into the soil before the spring planting—sort of like mulching your yard with a lawn mower. I was startled, after we finished breakfast, to drive past acres and acres of pure black soil. What once would have looked like a land made entirely of whole wheat pasta now looked like it was made of a thick layer of used Starbucks coffee grounds.

It's hard to argue against the economics for the farmer. An industry that has been wracked by mass industrialization has devastated the individual farmer. If an opportunity to make a profit and stay alive comes along, he has to take it. He can't be blamed. Not by me. Not by Uncle Mark, who hasn't worked in farming since the demise of the family agricultural chemical business twenty-odd years ago, and not by hunters who have for decades pursued their passion thanks in large part to the kindness of the farmers now faced with this opportunity. But that doesn't mean it's not noteworthy.

We drove for perhaps a half hour from Mason City to Thornton on a two-lane highway. Mark told me the story about the decline in pheasants and how this farm came to be a part of the family. I didn't quite follow all the details, but a friend of his inherited his father's vast tracts (and here it's hard not to imagine the scene in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
with the father who tries to convince his son of his future wealth despite the son's protestations that he only wants to sing) and there had been a bit of a family dispute. Mark told Uncle Paul, who had said he might be looking for a hobby farm. Uncle Paul called Uncle Roger and before Mark knew it, his brothers had bought the place without him, something I sensed still bothered him though the whole thing had happened more than twenty years ago. It was hard to follow the details because no one in Mark's family drinks coffee so I had not yet had any caffeine. Add in the heavy, hearty breakfast and my general nerves about the hunt to come and you can be safe in assuming that it was a good thing I wasn't behind the wheel. I've never been able to navigate in Iowa. Though the state is laid out in mile-by-mile grids of roads, I'm constantly lost. Once, while making my way home from a brief visit, I drove a route that was as familiar as my face, noticing farmsteads I thought I knew and recognized. After a couple of hours and running low on fuel, I stopped for gas in a town I thought I had driven through a hundred times throughout my life only to realize—thanks to a glance at the GPS on my phone, that not only had I never been to this place, but I had been traveling almost straight west for more than the hundred miles I thought I had been driving south. It was disconcerting to say the least. Especially since I am actually quite good with directions. It never takes me long to find north and I have, on several occasions, dead-reckoned my way home from unfamiliar places based on nothing but instinct and an understanding of spatial relationships between where I am and where I want to be.

But Iowa is different. Everywhere you look are the same slight, but rolling hills, the same vast fields, the same small, sometimes bleak, towns with the same Casey's General Store and the same grain silo as anywhere else you go. I try to explain this to my friends, and to help them understand, I tell them to imagine being in a maze of subterranean hallways with every surface painted the exact same color tan. You may only make right-angled turns, but after a while you lose track of how many of them were lefts and how many of them were rights. Eventually, you may be back to where you start, but you wouldn't recognize it if you were. In Iowa, you can drive for hours and hours and the only discernible landmarks you may see are the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, but by then you're either in Nebraska or Illinois. If you get to the Mall of America, you've been in Minnesota for at least two hours and if you get to the St. Louis Arch, you're halfway through Missouri.

And yet, it is an appealing landscape and one I could be pleasantly lost in for days. Iowa is far from the flat plain it is often billed as. In fact, the land lilts like an Irish accent, dotted by stands of old gnarly oak and hemlock and broken by hundreds of creeks and rivers with fertile names like Cedar and Winnebago. Crossing over from the dull pancake of western Illinois, I've often noticed how even the air seems different. Cleaner. Thicker. Bigger. Even on an early day like the one I first hunted, the gray skies seem different than they do in Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan or Virginia or any of the other places I have found myself on gray mornings. Less gloomy. A dreary morning in Cleveland is like having a head cold during a tax audit. But in Iowa the same conditions seem somehow more optimistic. If it rains in Cincinnati, traffic stops and people gripe at work. If it rains in Iowa, it's good because the fields need it. It's hard to say if the culture makes the place in my mind or if the place makes the culture, but either way I look forward to the restorative power of my visits, which keep me grounded and leave me dreading my concrete and faux-brick suburban life.

Mark navigated to the farm by rote. We stopped at the gas station in Thornton, which I estimated made up roughly one-third of the retail economy in this tiny town, and I poured myself a cup of much-needed coffee. I like to put a couple of ice cubes in my coffee. For one thing, I tend to gulp and there really is no pain like a scalded tongue, and two, it tends to cut the acidity of coffee—especially the kind of tar-thick lava-hot java you find at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. I looked for a soda fountain, but didn't see one and asked the man behind the counter if the store had an ice machine.

“No, sorry, don't have one,” he told me.

“Really?” I asked. My incredulity was based on the sheer variety of goods the store carried. In addition to the usual bags of chips and twelve-packs of beer, the gas station stocked boiled peanuts, fireworks, rubber gloves, pig chow, live bait, and mesh-backed caps with cornstalks silk-screened on them and, behind the counter, a variety of adult magazines that would make Larry Flint blush. Yet no ice machine.

“You can buy a bag of ice if you're really interested,” the clerk added helpfully. I passed and decided I would just have to wait a few minutes for the coffee to cool down before I could take a sip. The man behind the counter nodded at Uncle Mark as he paid for his Diet Pepsi.

“You think you're going to get anything today?” he asked. And in our reinforced pants and blaze orange hats, you didn't have to be a gas station attendant in the middle of nowhere Iowa to catch on that we were hunters.

“I hope so,” said Mark. “They're just not around like they used to be.”

“No,” said the man. “No, they aren't. Well, good luck to ya.”

We all said thank you and returned to the truck. It was in this moment that I felt like I was a part of something, some masculine ritual in which the villager bids the hunter a fruitful hunt, sending him off into the field with well wishes and, one assumes, quiet prayers for bounty. I realize it seems a bit dramatic, but that small exchange in the store made me feel like I was going out to be a part of something big, important, daring. It was a small boost of confidence and much-needed caffeine, even if I did burn the tip of my tongue.

When you think of an Iowa farm, you probably conjure a picture of a white clapboard house and a big red barn, an outsized garage with sliding doors and a silo. The farm belonging to my uncles, Paul and Roger, is nothing like that. There once was a home on the property, but it rotted away years ago. The only sign that it is anything other than a big field is a ramshackle shell of a what used to be a cow barn and a windmill standing above a no-longer-operational well. It's a beautiful piece of property. At 160 acres, it is a half mile by a half mile, and only a few acres had been actively farmed that year—by a neighbor who had leased some land from my uncles to bolster his bumper corn crop.

We pulled off the gravel road onto a flat piece of grass and pulled up next to three other vehicles. Our fellow hunters had already arrived and were standing around, shotguns resting lazily over limp arms, watching two larger German shorthairs—Ava and Jaeger—play and bounce, frolicking in the early cool breeze.

Since this was my first time hunting and because he wanted it to be a special occasion, Uncle Mark had called my cousins Rob and Ben and invited them along. In terms of hierarchy, I fit directly between the two, with Rob two years my senior and Ben three years younger than me. Rob had recently been named Teacher of the Year at the North Iowa Area Community College, where he taught auto mechanics. Growing up, he was my closest cousin and the brother I had never fully appreciated how badly I needed. When we were young, we used to put on old boxing gloves and rip the tags off our jeans for mouth protection and box in his bedroom. We once joined up with another cousin, Travis, to force-feed our cousin Kevin cookies and red pop, then told him jokes until he quite literally popped, projectile vomiting doughy red frosting and fizz all over Grandma's kitchen floor during the family New Year's Eve get-together. It was and is quite possibly the meanest thing I have ever done and also one of my fondest memories. Robby, as we knew him then, became something of a hell-raiser in his teenage years. Uncle Mark told me it was touch-and-go for a while as to whether Robby would make something of himself or spend his adulthood making license plates in jail. It wasn't until he met his wife, Dana, that he settled down. And now the former teenage hellcat is a member of the local school board and was named by the
Mason City Globe-Gazette
as one of the “20 Under 40” making a positive difference in the community, something difficult to imagine at best, worthy of a fact-check in the least, to all of us who knew him when he was driving a Chevy Blazer that required a stepladder to get into and sporting the worst 1980s ducktail haircut you have ever seen.

My cousin Ben and I, though close in age, were not all that close growing up. He was the oldest of the youngest cousins, whereas Robby and I ran in the middle pack while his sisters, Heather and Heidi, and my sisters, Amy and Jill, teamed up with Uncle Roger's three boys—Chris, Dave, and Matt—to form the oldest of the pack. This kind of striation is common in big families. My dad is the fourth of nine children. Mark is his youngest sibling. Mark is only a couple of years older than Chris, the oldest of the cousins. When the oldest cousin is in his late forties and the youngest, Tom, is only seventeen, there is bound to be some division. But if Ben and I didn't spend that much time together growing up, things have changed as adults. It seems every time I am in Mason City, he drives the ninety miles from Waterloo, where he works as an engineer for John Deere, to see me. Tom told me Ben canceled a trip to Kansas City when he heard that I was coming to hunt, a trip Tom believes involved spending time with a young woman. So I was, needless to say, flattered to see him waiting, shotgun in hand, to join me on my first hunt.

I watched the complicated and subtle dynamics of hunting parties play out before me as we stood in a circle making small talk. Someone needed to be the leader, the “Jaegermeister” as Mark put it. When he said it, I assumed we would all be taking a shot of the liqueur before heading out into the field and got excited for a moment, then nervous remembering my hunter's education class and the crusty Arthur's admonition against drinking and hunting. I was both relieved and disappointed when I realized the term referred to the leader of a hunt. Damn, the things I don't know for not having taken that second semester of German in college. Rob spends nearly every weekend bird hunting. The land belonged to Ben's dad, so technically that made him the landowner. But Uncle Mark was the oldest and most experienced and it seemed right to defer to him when deciding our course of action. I wasn't expected to say anything, which is good, because in the thirty seconds or so that it took those three to work out a plan, I felt a jabbing sensation in my neck, reached up, and realized that I had forgotten to take the tags off my new blaze orange hunting vest. I snatched it quickly and said a silent prayer that no one else had noticed before I could yank it off and stuff it into the padding of my gun case, the one Dad had given me nearly seven months before.

“You know what we're doing here, right?” Mark asked, taking me aside as Rob and his friend John tended to Jaeger, and Tom and his friend B.J. tended to Zeke, and Ben and his friend Adam tended to Adam's dog, Ava.

“Sure,” I said. My pulse had quickened with the tag incident, and I could feel my palms getting sweaty under my spiffy new shooting gloves. I may have known, then again maybe I didn't. My mind was swirling, and the harder I thought about the hunting techniques section of the hunter's ed class, the less clear it came back to me.

“We're gonna spread out,” Mark said, as if it were a reminder and not an education. “We're gonna form a line. Keep fifteen, twenty yards between you and the guys on either side of you. Don't get ahead, don't fall behind. That's how people accidentally get shot. Make sure that if you see a bird and it's a hen you call out ‘hen!' We only shoot roosters. If you see a rooster, you can call out ‘rooster,' but I won't.”